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Gyges
"Nice base. I'll take it." :- Gyges operator Background Deep within the abandoned ruins of the Bacchus Sprawl in what used to be the city of Naples, some people still survive, and as long as they do so, the Syndicate's subsidiary companies will survive as well. However, not all activity in the Sprawl is confined to Apollo Park, as the still-inhabited district is known, and by this point in time, not all the computer systems in the Desolation are entirely functional. And some of those that are, have become... unreliable. Legion Security's solution to expeditions into the Desolation would no doubt be to simply destroy everything in its path, but Janus Solutions, the producer of the Sisyphus transport truck, elected to take a different approach. Many of the stationary computer-controlled systems in the Sprawl's ruin could be put to good use, and Janus Solutions came out with the Gyges, euphemistically dubbed an "Infrastructure Acquisition" vehicle. Like all Janus products, the Gyges is rugged, reliable, and surprisingly simple in operation. The Gyges first paints the desired target with a weapon jammer, similar but superior to the Allies' jammers from the war, then closes with the errant computer. A localized EMP burst completely shuts down the target, and the Gyges extends its intrusion interface, letting the onboard AI reconfigure whatever software, wires, or indeed anything else that might be necessary to reprogram the machine - the Gyges is hardly restricted to just AI-operated systems, and the company updates the AI's roster of known mechanisms and how to take control of them daily. When the recalcitrant machine recovers from the EMP burst, it is fully under the Syndicate's control. Although initially designed and used solely for use within the Bacchus Sprawl, Janus executives noted the versatility of the Gyges design after a few months of field tests as challenging as only expeditions into a ruined Sprawl can be, and offered the design to the Syndicate as a whole as battlefield "salvage" equipment. The Gyges, Janus promised, could disable and acquire any battlefield fortifications the enemy would care to mount, and proved it with demonstrations of Gyges stealing fully armed tesla coils, wave-force towers, and multigunner towers. The Syndicate judged the results worthy of further investigation, and in truth, there has only been one significant change to the design since its initial inception: a set of sophisticated stealth systems, collectively dubbed a cloaking device. With this new stealth capability in hand, the Gyges of today is a lucrative acquisition for a Syndicate executive disposed towards hostile takeovers: now, enemy fortifications need not be simply destroyed, but can be acquired for one's own use. This is the sort of directly profit-minded thinking that takes one far in the Syndicate, and so the Gyges has become a common sight in Syndicate forces worldwide. Behind The Scenes In Greek mythology, Gyges is one of the Hecatoncheires, giants with fifty heads and a hundred hands. Also, Plato wrote a story centering around the Ring of Gyges, which asked if man would be moral without any consequences. Category:Units